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WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

eng.aurelienpierre.com

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Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#61

Post by f1shy »

lol768 wrote: post #42
rsp1984 wrote: post #24

This seems to be in the same spirit as audiophiles claiming they can hear the difference between various speaker cables, or the "hints of dark chocolate" in wine tasting. Personally I see zero differences in the images on that page and unless the author has some really super-human vision abilities (possible! but unlikely) my guess is he doesn't either. WebP looks perfectly fine to me.

It's very easy to see the banding if you have a half-decent monitor. You don't even need to view the images fullscreen - and I say that as someone short-sighted with deuteranomaly.

I think deuteranomaly plays absolute no role in B&W images. And if any, helps to view defects that other don't. I have it.

The artefacts are visible mostly in the background, where frankly I do not care.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#63

Post by RealStickman_ »

V__ wrote: post #4

I opened the first two pictures in separate tabs and switched quickly between them. There is zero difference. Tried it on two different monitors, Chrome and Firefox. Same with the pictures of the guy at the end. EDIT: The last comparison is webp twice, he linked it wrong. Here is the jpg one, still no difference: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...

The first picture is very hard to spot imo. I had to zoom in a bit to spot it initially. You'll see the "blockiness" is slightly worse in the webp version. (Left side of the image, head height)

For the second image, I opened the jpeg 90 [1] and webp 90 [2] versions. Comparing those two, there are clear banding issues to the right of the neck. Slightly less visible are the darker bands circling around the whole image, though still noticeable if you know where to look.

Comparing the jpeg 90 version with either webp lossless, jpeg 100 or jpeg 95, I can spot some very slight banding in the jpeg 90 version just to the right of the neck. Very difficult to spot though without zooming in.

[1] https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...

[2] https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#64

Post by arp242 »

londons_explore wrote: post #56
Latty wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must admit, I'm not sure why JPEG XL is viewed so favourably on HN, it's not something I know a ton about, but my understanding is that the big advantage of AVIF is that you can reuse hardware decoders built into devices for AV1 for the images. It being a strict improvement over JPEG is nice for the developers not having to go back to the source image for an upgrade, but that seems like a pretty small benefit that…

Image decode is a rather tiny fraction of the loading time of a modern web page, or its power budget... Thats why, to my knowledge, nobody even bothers to use hardware jpeg encoders/decoders on phones/laptops, despite many bits of silicon having them.

JPEG may be fast enough for all of that, but is that also true for these newer ones? Decoding the .heic pictures from my old iPhone takes 1-2 seconds on my laptop(!!) As near as I could find out that's because the iPhones and macBooks and such all have hardware support for that, and my ThinkPad doesn't.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#65

Post by qhwudbebd »

laserbeam wrote: post #6

I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.

I assumed they were intentional for editorial effect: deliberately designed to disrupt the flow of a reader attempting to follow the text, in the same way that he claims the compression artefacts disrupt the perception of a skilled photographer trying to use the heavily compressed webp and jpeg images.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#66

Post by 627467 »

> To the non-educated eye, this might look ok, but for a photographer it’s not, and for several reasons.

There surely must be better examples to show "non-educated" plebs (to use the tone of the post) why webp is bad and to justify the post and the tone.

I'm on Android, maybe this is why all pic quality look the same?

Also - yeah, if you are making pics for educated eyes: don't use tech that is not suitable for educated eyes? Or don't outsource that decision making to others?

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#67

Post by [deleted] »

bawolff wrote: post #45
lm28469 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not, it's just that people who spend thousands of dollars and hours into photography are more susceptible to care. Same with music, most people are fine with $15 earphones while musicians or music enthusiasts will find them disgusting.

Music is probably a bad example of your point, as that field is famous for audiophiles insisting they can hear a difference for various things only for them not being able to tell the difference in a double blind test.

[deleted]

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#68

Post by washadjeffmad »

Latty wrote: post #7
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #3

It's such a shame Google decided to block adoption of JPEG XL: it's a strict improvement over classic JPEG (you can losslessly reencode JPEG to JXL and reduce the size, due to a better entropy coder in JXL!) and JXL has various other upgrades compared to 'classic' JPEG. In the meantime, let's hope AVIF or whatever manages to pick up the slack, and/or other browsers decide en masse to support JPEG XL anyway; that woul…

I must admit, I'm not sure why JPEG XL is viewed so favourably on HN, it's not something I know a ton about, but my understanding is that the big advantage of AVIF is that you can reuse hardware decoders built into devices for AV1 for the images. It being a strict improvement over JPEG is nice for the developers not having to go back to the source image for an upgrade, but that seems like a pretty small benefit that…

Then doesn't that follow the line of argument for why AV1 isn't being adopted, either? Namely, lack of hardware support?

I can understand why jxl isn't a dominant web format, but I don't see where avif has any place being a web format currently.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#69

Post by avereveard »

vardump wrote: post #20
V__ wrote: post #4

I opened the first two pictures in separate tabs and switched quickly between them. There is zero difference. Tried it on two different monitors, Chrome and Firefox. Same with the pictures of the guy at the end. EDIT: The last comparison is webp twice, he linked it wrong. Here is the jpg one, still no difference: https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20...

I checked those images on a Macbook 16 M2 Max (standard P3-1600 nits preset), Chrome 120.0.6099.109. All of the WebP images had pretty bad posterization, while JPEG examples did not. Edit: You have to actually click for a full size image to see the truth. Those inline images had pretty bad compression artefacts, even the supposed lossless versions. So https://eng.aurelienpierre.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/20... (f…

the second image and the third image are half resolution of the other, yeah some posterization is visible in Shoot-Antoine-0044-_DSC0085-lossless-1200x675.webp, but it's half resolution and he purposefully added a high frequency noise for his test then averaged the noise point trough resizing, and well, of course it's blurry.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#70

Post by RealStickman_ »

mihaic wrote: post #30

This article didn't go into the biggest problem with webp for me: the inconveninence of the format outside the browser compared to the small space saving. There are better formats (the video-codec inspired ones like heif, avif, and what might come out of h266, or even jpeg-xl), and webp just seems like a compromise without enough upside.

WebP is actually based on a video codec. It's just that VP8 pretty much never caught on with hardware encoders/decoders apparently.
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